A look at the R&D Labs of major vendors

Wondering what's happening in the research and development labs of some of today's largest vendors? Top researchers from Cisco, HP and Intel shared the stage at MIT's EmTech Conference--"EmTech" being MIT's new name for what used to be called the Emerging Technology Conference. Topping the list is power consumption, parallelism and mobile communications. Andrew Chien, vice president of research at Intel said that his company feels that wireless devices, applications, and service providers are still falling short in terms of how "intuitive" and "seamless" their technologies currently are. Specifically, he said that today's handhelds should support tools that use geolocation and onboard sensors to give users data that is pertinent to their personal condition and immediate surroundings. Cisco, meanwhile, said it is looking for ways to merge telepresence with collaboration tools--not surprising, as Cisco recently acquired WebEx. And HP is working on ways to more tightly link handhelds with back-end datacenter systems.

Internally, it looks like the companies are giving their R&D labs a real facelift. HP is trying to lower the overall number of research projects by folding them into larger efforts and Intel is establishing "lablets," or groups of researchers that it sponsors at academic institutions. Cisco, meanwhile, is encouraging individual groups to be more entrepreneurial in their development efforts.

For more news on the conference:
- read the article in Infoworld
- see the article in eWeek